Business cards spent, brainpan marinating in Bud Light–this may as well be a guest post tonight, because I’m not entirely sure who I am anymore. The last alumni event ended catastrophically, in no uncertain terms, and I later found out the aborted concert marked the final gasp of a dying chapter. Now, two years later, I’m at the ground floor of a new beginning, with a different group vibe and a heightened tolerance for community, and I’ve thrown my hat into the ring.
Tonight was happy hour for Big Ten alumnae, deep below ground in a hella hot bar. Usually such events will deplete my energy completely and knock me flat for a week or two thereafter, but that hasn’t been the case lately. No, I clocked in more than two hours and mingled. Mingled, like a man possessed by normalcy. All it took was a self-prescribed kick in the pants.
The first 15 seconds are always brutal, whenever you enter a room full of strangers. That’s the time horizon you have to either break into an existing cluster of people, or miss the train completely. You know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s cutthroat and harrowing, when you think about it. I spent the first 10 seconds locked in internal dialogue, a dark swirl of thoughts that was patently unproductive. Who are these people? I mean, the reason they’re congregating is because they’re no longer attending the same college, ridiculous as that sounds. We sure wouldn’t have socialized if we were all still there.
It was a war of self, cynic pitted against hopeful, until the latter told the former to shut the fuck up. After that, it was easy. A loud venue means you can get by with prop beer in hand, smiling at the right times, ample nodding, and swapping cards whenever other people start reaching for their wallets or purses. Now, don’t get me wrong–conversation, some of it actually good, occurred as well–but on the whole, I was more amazed with how easy it was to negotiate the event. The mechanics just made sense. It feels like I’ve leveled up in sociability, hungry for what’s next, and possibility, rather than evasion, is the order of the day. Perhaps there will come a time when happy hour, currently neither happy nor limited to an hour, will deliver on its promise.
Again! Once again I left you hanging with a single post last week, a grave misstep that not only halved our usual amount of content, but also abused one of the tenets I hold dear: consistency. For me, there’s always been a kind of comfort in frequency. Two posts each week, good or bad, and as long as they show up, we cool. When you think about it, it’s a celebration of quantity, an “A” for attendance. It’s like finding a paper on your virtual doorstep every Tuesday and Thursday. You may not even read it, but it’s nice to know it’s there, fixed and true.
So what does this mean? Are we closing up shop here? Will I even be able to finish this post? Probably! And here’s why. You’ll recall that I’m not writing for readership or revenue. Heck, I don’t remember the last time I was genuinely excited about jamming my username and password into the site. Years, fair estimate. No, I’m writing out of necessity, specifically for yours truly. This double-post schedule has been optimized to assure I feel sharp throughout the week, and sure enough, my recent negligence has exacted its toll.
I’ve described this feeling before as a mental veil, and I think it’s a reasonable portrayal. It’s not entirely unpleasant–a warm gauze settling on your brain–but what gets you is knowing you could be faster, better, smarter, so here we are. And believe me, I have things to tell you: thoughts about people, career, and how I secretly violate elevator courtesy on most mornings. I know I mentioned how I’m writing for myself, but all that said, I thought about making it up to you with a special Friday post. But then Friday turned into Saturday, then Sunday, then Monday, and I had a good laugh.
The evening nap. One of the most diabolical inventions wrought by humanity, technically available to all, arguably beneficial to none, and it’s something I narrowly avoided just now. It’s one of those things that seems like a good idea. Clearly your body wants to recuperate, and a little shut-eye wouldn’t hurt, right? But once you take that evening nap–presumably to rest up for the impending eight hours of slumber–you’re guaranteed to ruin your sleep cycle.
I was close. So close. But as I started dozing off, mere minutes away from sweet oblivion, I snapped back to reality. There was blogging to be done, and if there’s one thing that can drag me back into the waking world, it’s the prospect of depositing roughly 300 to 450 words into WordPress twice a week. Tonight, we’re going to talk about talking. Dizzy enough? Good.
One unintentional benefit of being more sociable is a heightened sense of conversation, specifically conversational options. At the end of the day, the actual content of a discussion is only part of the story–there’s something to be said, too, about how speech unfolds and its ability to alter the general mood. For some discussions, I can “see” a few possible replies before me, during the discussion itself. There will be three, four possible things to say that flash across my mind: a subdued, more agreeable response on the right side of this imaginary spectrum, and a bluntly offensive one on the left side, with one or two in between. You’d think the offensive choice would be off-limits, but it can be used to get a laugh.
In geek terms, this is almost like a dialogue menu in computer games. Remember King’s Quest? Yeah, something like that. Now, this doesn’t happen for every conversation–that would be a one-way ticket to clinical insanity–but in the instances where it does occur, it’s a rush. It’s thrilling to be able to alter the flow of talk, and when people fundamentally want to talk about themselves, it’s a way to enrich the texture of a conversation. The talk will naturally come to a close, though, and when that moment comes, it’s time to bow out, call it a day. Kinda like what I’m going to do now.